Op-Ed

When the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement (Anti-ELAB Movement) broke out in 2019, I showed my support by using a black Bauhinia avatar on social media. A friend with a pro-China, pro-establishment stance privately messaged me with this question: “Even if you are fighting for freedom and democracy, why use radical actions like street graffiti, storming the Legislative Council, and occupying the airport?” I don’t remember how I responded at the time. To be honest, I hadn’t fully thought through the question back then. I admit, I couldn’t answer because, frankly, it was at least partly a concern of mine at the time as well.

Five years have passed. In these five years, Hong Kong has undergone drastic changes. On the other side of the river in China, the collusion between totalitarian politics and the COVID-19 pandemic has added more blood and tears to countless collective memories of trauma. If I were to answer that question now, my response would be different. The struggle of the Hong Kong people is not just about democratic political systems. It’s also about defending their subjectivity, identity, and even the sovereignty of their lives. As for some of the radical actions within the social movement, it was the establishment and the colonizers who taught us a very clear message: ignoring structural inequality and engaging in peaceful protests within the established framework is futile.

In the spring of 2022, Louisa Lim published the book Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong. This book focuses on a street figure known as the “Emperor of Kowloon,” Tsang Tsou-choi. Through his life story, Lim constructs a narrative of Hong Kong history that is markedly different from the propaganda of both the Chinese government and the British colonial government. In a certain sense, Tsang Tsou-choi is a symbol of grassroots public culture in Hong Kong: his background is very obscure, having immigrated from Guangzhou, China, through family reunification and worked as a laborer until he was disabled by a work injury. While sorting through the belongings of his deceased relatives, he claimed to have found a document issued by the Qing imperial court, which supposedly granted his ancestors the governing rights over the Kowloon area long before the colonial era began. For almost half a century until his death, Tsang asserted that he was the legitimate ruler of the Kowloon area, not the British colonial government or the Chinese Communist Party. He had little formal education and no training in calligraphy, but he persistently used a brush to write his political claims in crooked, often misspelled, and grammatically incorrect characters on the walls of Kowloon’s streets and alleys. Through his sporadic graffiti, he constructed a narrative of Hong Kong’s history that was entirely different from the official accounts of both the British and Chinese authorities.

Tsang lived his whole life in extreme poverty and was often suspected of having mental health issues. On one hand, his persistent graffiti became a subject of media curiosity and capitalist exploitation; on the other hand, the Hong Kong government continuously refused to officially acknowledge his contribution to the development of local culture and often erased or demolished his graffiti under the pretext of urban beautification. Tsang passed away in 2007. During his lifetime, he clashed countless times with government workers attempting to destroy his graffiti. Twelve years after his death, in 2019, the same regime used violent means to erase the politically charged graffiti of street protesters. Based on this, Louisa Lim poses a central question in her book: Who has the right to write Hong Kong’s history? Who has the right to tell Hong Kong’s story? Is it the British colonizers, the Chinese authorities, or the ordinary people of Hong Kong?

Tsang’s graffiti not only provides a narrative distinct from the official version, but it also serves as a thread connecting the dramatic changes in Hong Kong over the past half-century. Tsang began his street graffiti in Hong Kong in the early 1980s. Coming from a poor working-class background, Tsang was not the only one offering a narrative of Hong Kong’s history that differed from both the Chinese and British official versions. Around the same time, as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and China’s Deng Xiaoping began discussing Hong Kong’s future post-1997, Hong Kong business elite Sir S.Y. Chung also traveled to Beijing in 1983 to meet with Deng Xiaoping. When Sir S.Y. tried to present a more Hong Kong-centric historical narrative, hoping to secure a place for Hongkongers in discussions about the city’s future political agenda, Deng arrogantly and dismissively told him, “Britain and China will settle Hong Kong’s future without any interference. There have been references to a ‘three-legged stool’. There are no three legs, only two.” (pp.118).

After Hong Kong came under Chinese rule in 1997, Tsang’s street graffiti continued, and in that year, his works were displayed on canvas in a solo exhibition at the prestigious Hong Kong Arts Centre. Subsequently, Tsang’s graffiti was shaped by television and various media companies into a public cultural symbol, considered part of the so-called “Hong Kong city spirit,” appearing in numerous TV commercials and entertainment works. It seemed that the continued presence of Tsang’s graffiti post-1997 symbolized the sustained prosperity of Hong Kong under Chinese rule. However, the city’s sanitation department continuously erased Tsang’s graffiti under the pretext of maintaining the city’s appearance, and Tsang continued to create new graffiti, narrating his family stories until his death in 2007. Even after his death, the Hong Kong government did not cease its efforts to remove his works. Simultaneously, not only Tsang’s graffiti but also Queen’s Pier, another part of Hongkongers’ collective memory, was dismantled and erased.

After the 2003 anti-Article 23 movement, the 2012 anti-patriotic education movement, and the 2014 Umbrella Movement, under increasingly stringent social control, the remnants of Tsang’s street graffiti had almost all been cleared. In 2015, author Louisa Lim finally found some remnants of Tsang’s work on a remote wall in Hong Kong and hurriedly called legislator Tanya Chan to come and view them together. In 2010, Chan had proposed that the Hong Kong government take measures to preserve and protect Tsang’s remaining street works, but her proposal received no positive response. Years later, Tanya Chan was also imprisoned on political charges imposed by the Hong Kong government and eventually went into exile in Taiwan. Today, along with Tsang’s works, other symbols of Hong Kong’s identity have also disappeared, including Queen’s Pier, the Causeway Bay Books, independent media like Stand News, the Goddess of Democracy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the song “Glory to Hong Kong,” which resonated through Hong Kong’s streets in 2019.

The fate of Tsang’s works is a poignant metaphor, as one of the curators involved in Tsang’s graffiti exhibitions told Louisa Lim: “It’s all about my sense of belonging, my home, my identity, and this land is identity, this home is being stolen. That includes the past and the future.” (pp. 131)

Tsang Tsou-choi’s writings may not be elegant, his claims may not withstand historical scrutiny, and what he wrote was full of spelling and grammatical errors, but his existence itself symbolizes an alternative grassroots narrative about Hong Kong’s origins. The Hong Kong government, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, is not just trying to erase Tsang’s graffiti; they are attempting to erase what the graffiti represents: a narrative about the city that is rooted in the grassroots and fundamentally different from the official political agenda of the Chinese Empire. What the authorities in Hong Kong and China are trying to eliminate also includes the rights and legitimacy of Hong Kong people to narrate their own history and identity in a local, everyday manner.

During the Anti-ELAB Movement in 2019, all the language used to narrate the events was thoroughly distorted to serve the specific political purposes of the authorities. In the initial protests, although many voices called for the Chinese government to respect Hong Kong’s subjectivity and agency, the five core demands put forward by the protesters did not directly address the issue of Hong Kong’s sovereignty in the context of international law. However, under the manipulation of the Chinese government’s propaganda machine, these five demands were equated with advocating for Hong Kong independence.

On July 21, 2019, under the direction of Junius Ho, an important agent of the Chinese government in the Hong Kong Legislative Council, more than 700 triad members, hired by the Chinese and Hong Kong governments, launched an indiscriminate attack on citizens and protesters at Yuen Long MTR station. Afterwards, the authorities claimed that the white-clad attackers were not gang members, while the victims were labeled as treasonous rioters. The truth of the matter no longer mattered. What was important was that under the dual forces of the propaganda machine and police violence, if the authorities labeled you a separatist, then you were a separatist; if they labeled you a rioter, then you were a rioter; if they labeled you a gang member, then you were a gang member. Even the discussion and debate of different versions of the story were no longer permitted, as any narrative differing from the official political propaganda would be seen as defiance and treason.

I read this newly released book in the spring of 2022. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific in China, another humanitarian disaster was rapidly unfolding.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government has banned any narratives about COVID-19 that differ from the official line and has implemented an extremely harsh zero-COVID policy to reinforce state control over society. Public intellectuals who sharply criticized the zero-COVID policy, such as Zhang Zhan, and doctors who informed the public about the true situation of the pandemic from a medical perspective, such as Li Wenliang, were successively sentenced to prison on political charges or even persecuted to death.

By 2022, the Chinese government ignored the high infection rate and low fatality rate of the Omicron variant and the impacts of secondary disasters, implemented inhumane lockdowns in cities like Xi’an and Shanghai. The documentation and narration of these secondary disasters by the public never ceased. Articles such as “Ten Days in Chang’an,” which detailed the dire situation in Xi’an, and the video “Voices of April,” produced by Shanghai residents to depict the secondary disasters under the lockdown, were all deleted by the Chinese government or internet & technology companies backed by the government.

The Chinese government bans all non-official narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic based on personal experiences. In the official Chinese narrative, the zero-COVID policy is a battleground to prove the superiority of the Chinese Communist Party’s political system, leaving no room for compromise. In the face of this political agenda, all accounts concerning individual dignity, everyday life experiences, and needs beyond preventing COVID-19 are deemed political heresy and are erased—just like Tsang Tsou-choi’s graffiti, the graffiti of all Anti-Extradition Law protesters, the shutting down of the majority of non-establishment media in Hong Kong, the prohibition of people lighting candles in Victoria Park on June 4th, the ban on singing the song “Glory to Hong Kong,” and the prohibition of spreading and teaching historical narratives that emphasize Hong Kong’s subjectivity.

While attempting to suppress all dissent, the Chinese government imposes a distorted discourse system that can be arbitrarily interpreted according to political needs on the entire society. For example, during the COVID-19 period, the Chinese government divided all daily life affairs into “necessary” and “non-necessary” categories using a one-size-fits-all approach and authorized local officials and police to arbitrarily prohibit all activities deemed “non-necessary.” This includes banning citizens from “non-necessary” travel abroad, prohibiting “non-necessary” entertainment (such as watching movies and karaoke), and banning the purchase of “non-necessary” food during lockdowns. As for what is necessary and what is non-necessary, there are no clear standards; everything depends on the personal will of the officials representing the party-state apparatus.

During the Shanghai lockdown, a video circulated on social media showing a resident arguing with an officer. The resident believed that according to the policy, his family should receive three boxes of eggs, but the officer was only willing to give him one. In the argument, the officer rudely told the resident that all supplies were only to meet the “minimum guarantee,” and any requests beyond the “minimum guarantee” were not allowed. In anger, the resident said, “If that’s the case, then no one should eat!” He then smashed many eggs placed on the cart next to the officer. How absurd this is: in the words of that official, the state’s supplies are so tight that they must be stingy over a box of eggs. At the same time, the regime they serve still uses fiscal expenditure to support its vast police system and propaganda department, while countless residents are starving, with some even committing suicide.

Anything officials dislike is classified as “non-necessary,” just as anything the puppet government of Hong Kong dislikes is classified as “violating the National Security Law” or “violating Article 23.”

Seeing this scene and recalling the sarcastic and critical voices that accused the valiant protesters in the Anti-ELAB Movement of not being peaceful enough: how absurd and privileged those voices are, without even realizing that when all normal channels of expression are destroyed, people can only use unconventional means to express their demands and tell their stories. As widely propagated by the protesters in the movement, ” You have taught us that peaceful protests are useless.” When a system is designed to systematically oppress one group of people by another, how can the oppressed possibly seek justice within the system and rules designed by the oppressors?

The people will not remain silent forever. On October 13, 2022, a citizen named Peng Lifa hung banners on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge, condemning China’s zero-COVID policy and the suppression of civil society and individual dignity. The first sentence on Peng Lifa’s banner was “We want food, not PCR tests.” He burned tires on the overpass and repeatedly broadcasted the slogans from his banner through a loudspeaker until he was taken away by the police. His current whereabouts and fate remain unknown.In the following days, sympathizers began secretly posting and graffitiing related slogans from the Sitong Bridge protest in public restrooms and other places across China. The Sitong Bridge protest was not only a political statement against the Chinese government but also a narrative of the collective memory of COVID-19. In this narrative, China under the zero-COVID policy is not a safe, happy, and stable model country for COVID-19 prevention, but a bloody empire filled with hunger, lies, bureaucracy, political dictatorship, and the trampling of basic human dignity for political purposes.

A little over a month later, the A4 Revolution broke out in China. Angry citizens voiced countless grievances against the zero-COVID policy, recounted their miserable lives over the past three years on the streets, and even directly targeted the regime itself—something very rare in China. In some areas, protesters clashed with the police and even smashed police cars.

When the people of China, filled with rage, launched the A4 Revolution in the streets and in diaspora communities overseas, there were also hypocritical voices claiming to be “moderate,” questioning whether the protesters’ methods and slogans were too radical, and doubting whether calls to overthrow the regime truly represented the majority’s intentions. Such questions were nothing new, whether in China in 2022 or in Hong Kong in 2019.

When Christina Chan Hau-man, a Hong Kong activist long supporting the Tibetan community, was arrested in 2010 for clashing with the Hong Kong police, many self-proclaimed pro-democracy individuals criticized her actions as exceeding the boundaries of “peaceful, rational, and non-violent” protest. A decade later, during the anti-extradition movement, an increasing number of Hong Kong protesters engaged in direct confrontations against the regime and its police under the banner of “be water,” far more radical than Christina’s actions in 2010.

The increasingly radical social movements serve as a mirror, reflecting the regime’s growing brutality and the shrinking space for civil society. Long before the people adopted more extreme measures to resist the regime, the regime had already waged a comprehensive war on the people through systemic state violence. This war targeted ordinary people’s familiar languages, identities, dignity, communities, and their hopeful visions for the future.

A week before the Sitong Bridge protest, on October 5, 2022, Hong Kong writer Lee Yee passed away in Taiwan at the age of 86. He was one of the many exiled Hong Kongers who symbolized the high price one had to pay for narrating their viewpoints and the history and present of their community in ways deemed heretical by the government. This price was not just having their writings erased in Hong Kong, but also being permanently exiled from their homeland. This “erasure” of people’s language, identity, and dignity is comprehensive, affecting both spirit and body.

At the same time, what has been dismantled, erased, and wiped out includes the Goddess of Democracy statue at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Pillar of Shame at the University of Hong Kong, countless books banned in libraries for national security reasons, and the authors of these books. On June 4, 2024, at a hearing held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, one of the witnesses was Professor Rowena HE (何曉清). She had taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was expelled from both the university and Hong Kong due to her research and teaching on the Tiananmen Massacre. Meanwhile, in China, street signs for Urumqi Middle Road and Sitong Bridge, former protest sites, were removed by authorities. These locations have become unmentionable names in public spaces, much like June 4th has long been an unmentionable date. In the official narratives provided by the authorities, all the above seem to have never existed or happened.

In the dual dimensions of time and space, the totalitarian war on memory has never ceased. As the title of Louisa Lim’s other book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, suggests, forcing everyone to suffer from amnesia and lose the ability and awareness to tell their own stories is itself a continuation of repression and massacre. The consequences are self-evident: at the end of this book on the collective memory of the Tiananmen Massacre among the Chinese people, Louisa Lim provides a powerful yet immensely heavy conclusion. She says, “When those lies are taught in schools, passed unchallenged from one generation to the next, and truth-telling is punished, a moral vacuum gapes even larger, the debt grows greater, and the cost paid is the dearest of all: a loss of humanity.”

From this perspective, the Hong Kong government’s suppression of the Anti-ELAB Movement continues even five years later, and the crimes committed by the Chinese government during the Tiananmen Massacre have not ended thirty-five years later. For this reason, remembering, documenting, and narrating are acts of resistance. Five years later, as part of the Chinese diaspora, facing a world full of scars, I stand in solidarity with the Hong Kong community to jointly rebuild our erased, obliterated, destroyed, and delegitimized identities and narratives of each community. I stand in solidarity with the Hong Kong community, shouting “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

光復香港，時代革命。